The ink was barely dry on the law allowing rabbinical courts to hear child support cases even without the consent of both parents, and the uproar began. In a predictable chorus, the rabbinical court is once again painted as a monster, and the halachic process as deadly to women’s rights.
As always, for the umpteenth time, wherever Judaism appears, panic fills the air and the wail of warning about harm to women is heard. Substantive criticism of the law itself is hardly voiced. The assumption is that if rabbinical judges sit to deliberate on something, all human rights automatically vanish from the room.
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Rabbinical Court in Tel Aviv. In many cases, the rabbinical courts are more in touch with reality
(Photo: Ms. Li/ Shutterstock)
The uproar over the law is not only about children’s rights. It is tied to distrust of rabbinical judges, fear of religion, anxiety about rulings that carry the scent of halacha thousands of years old, or in short, everything that frightens the stereotype of the average liberal, in his own view. But just as divorces are never a black-and-white story, the system is not either.
From my extensive experience in courtrooms, in many cases, the rabbinical courts are more connected to the ground, to distress, and they do not rule out of an illusion of equality. In many cases, they have been the ones who understood better the economic reality of a single mother. Better than the family court, which clung to an ideology of equality that left a mother with 900 shekels a month for three children.
In family courts, the principle of equality is sanctified, and many women discover that it turns into blind equality, with minimal child support and shared parental responsibility that assumes an “economic equality” that in practice does not exist. In the end, the children are the ones who go to sleep with less.
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Protest outside the regional rabbinical court in Haifa, in a file photo
(Photo: Lior El-Chai)
In the race for authority between the different courts, the family court is not always the great savior, and the rabbinical court is not always the backward one. The best interests of the child are not just a nice slogan. Sometimes the “less enlightened” forum sees more clearly what a child truly needs: stability, security and a parent who provides what is required and does not evade responsibility through ideologies that only harm women and further weaken the most vulnerable women.
Want justice? Choose carefully where you seek it, based on your circumstances. Sometimes the right place is not the family court.
The storm sparked by the law raises another thought: If this is how the public reacts to any legislative change that touches the rabbinical court, how exactly do people expect to “integrate the ultra-Orthodox”? How will you seat on the same committee, around the same table, in the same army, those you keep calling “backward”? The answer is clear: There is no desire to integrate. There is a desire to change: the clothing, the judges, the worldview, the halacha. That is no longer integration, it is erasure.
Attorney Vered OvadiaThe claim that there is a wish to “integrate the ultra-Orthodox” is empty if every time an ultra-Orthodox person gains authority, half the country goes to war. If so, the big news of the week is not the law itself, but the battle around it, a battle that again and again reveals not maturity, but ignorance wrapped in hollow liberal rhetoric.
A final piece of advice: Before you hurl your arrows at the rabbinical court, spend an entire day there. See what the best interests of the child really look like. Then maybe you will understand that not everything black is coal. Sometimes it is also an address for rights.
- Attorney Vered Ovadia specializes in family and inheritance law.